We waited until my girls were 7 and 10 to go international. We went to St. Lucia that year, and they handled the flight well. We did Amsterdam/Brussels/Paris this year when they were 8 and 11, and as long as we didn’t do too much of one thing, they did great. I would have loved for them to have more context for what they were seeing, but as @DeepInTheHeartofTexas pointed out, the window for that is so small. We decided to go for it when I found a good deal on flights.
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THIS. I just can’t figure out why people thing baking in the 90 degree weather, slathered in foul smelling suntan lotion, getting covered with sand, and drinking luke-warm beer (unless you chug the whole bottle in the first 5 minutes it’s out of the cooler) is fun.
For the last 20 years I’ve lived 45 minutes from one of the best beaches in the country (Pensacola) and the number of times I’ve “gone to the beach” - other than to eat at some of the restaurants located there - I can count on one hand.
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Definitely feeling the squeeze. My middle turns 3 in a few weeks, so this trip is significantly more expensive (extra ticket plus paying at all the meals). We’ve cut back on any extras & are splitting the deluxe dining plan to save $ on food. We also fly on Tuesday/Wednesday to get the cheapest flights. I have to request my PTO 1year+ in advance, so I can’t take advantage of Priceline deals, etc very easily. We’ve compromised this time by staying value with a couple of nights @ deluxe.
I am with @kerrilux_625778 and @DeepInTheHeartofTexas that WDW is the easiest/most enjoyable for us in the stage of life. 3 kids under the age of 6 and we all get to enjoy our trip. I can’t wait to safari in Kenya, tour the national parks, and visit Europe but we just aren’t there yet. So many other places we could go now are so much work.
The beach was fun but exhausting. Pack up our crap, walk to the beach, lather everyone up in sunscreen, make sure no one drowns or gets stung by jellyfish, load everything up, walk home, give everyone a shower, clean up the sandy mess, wash suits and towels to get the sand off, make all the meals. WDW is just so much easier and relaxing for me!
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We’re definitely feeling it. I’m another who thinks more about “Is this a good use of our money?” than truly “Can we afford it?” Disney is the most expensive trip we take, and that’s doing it relatively cheaply. No park hoppers, no add ons, and we stay in Values. (Admittedly we’re a family of 5 and need the Family Suites, so that adds to the cost.) Our first trip was over spring break. It was crowded, but we had a good plan and enjoyed ourselves. That’s when we caught the Disney bug. So 2.5 years later we decided to go again and looked into spring break–prices had gone up so much that there was no way that was happening. Instead we managed to find a week that the kids had only a partial week of school and would only need to miss a few days. Not ideal, but it worked. But our oldest is in high school and taking a heavy course load now, so we aren’t going to be pulling him out of school for vacations any more. We won’t go summer because of the weather and we’re priced out of school vacation weeks, so I guess that’s it for us for a while. We’ve priced international travel, but for 5 of us the airfare alone is close to the cost of our 5 day Disney vacation.
DH and I have an adult trip coming up in November, and we briefly considered doing an add on because the cost is so much more affordable for 2 than for 5. But when we really looked at what they cost and what we’d get for the money, we decided they weren’t worth it for us. Not sure what will happen for us with regard to Disney after this trip. We do a “big” trip (WDW or something else) every 2 years. (On the other years we do something much cheaper, like a long weekend at the beach. We also do a lot of trips to visit family, but those are very inexpensive since we drive and stay with relatives.) Our 2020 trip definitely won’t be to Disney World. There’s a small chance we’d spend 1 day at Disneyland as part of a bigger trip to the West Coast. No idea if we’ll be back to Disney in 2022, when we do the next big vacation, but who knows what the prices will be by then!
I hear you. We don’t really go in the ocean. We stick to the sand and just walking along the edge of the water.
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It’s been discussed before that they are pricing people out and those of us paying are suckers.
Next time we agreed to stay offsite. In any vacation, we don’t skimp on meals so we will still do plenty of TS but I will use hacks like a 10:45 TH to pay the breakfast price. I refuse to cook when I’m in vacation except for heating waffles etc. We don’t do any of the Disney extras except for BBB and we bring our own costume and get the cheapest package.
In general, I’m willing to splurge on a vacation but only on things that are valuable to me. $100 for a dessert party or $450 a night for a hotel room isn’t to me.
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I am admittedly somewhat like you in that I love the extras. We’ve done EMM in MK and HS, HEA DP, Star Wars DP, FEA DP and DAH at MK. For 4 adults/3 kids or 2 adults/3 kids depending on the trip. I really wonder if at some point we decide it’s not really much extra to just go and do two or three days with a plaid than it is to continue to pay for extras and spend 8 days at WDW.
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I think we need to travel together!!
So I’m curious.
Why two 6 night stays each year? Why not one 10-14 night stay?
The pros:
one air fare
you’d be able to get all the FPs you need, making planning easier
you could get the 14 day ticket for the same price as a 7 day one
The cons:
longer between visits
only one time of year (but you could alternate spring/summer with autumn/winter)
What are your pros and cons for the shorter stays?
I feel it! We’re a family of 7, plus my mom is coming on this trip (and she’s generally invited on all our family vacations), so the extras are just not worth it. $800 for a dessert party? Or maybe $700, if the youngest is free? Nope. But it is a vacation, so there are some things I won’t do to save money. I won’t pack our lunches. I won’t do much cooking, even though we have a full kitchen. But anything with an extra ticket, times 7 or 8, starts to look like we’re spending the college funds. I’m choosing our TS meals carefully, and I’m not booking at resort restaurants if it’s going to take away from our limited park time. One extra I did book is the Wonderland Tea Party – but that’s a drop-off-your-kids event, so I only had to pay for the people who will enjoy it, not the whole group. And they’ll go on our rest day – it’s a fun Disney thing to do without a park ticket.
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Two is better than one!
I’m not sure what I’d do with 14 nights. There are four Disney parks and two Universal ones, but you can do Universal in a long day. So five full days (six nights) seems enough for me to have a decent go at each park.
The wait between two trips is six months. The wait between annual trips is a year. I discovered last year, when I booked my last minute December trip, that I didn’t want to wait that long.
And I don’t like to be away from home, and from Calvin, for that long. A six night trip is actually an eight night trip because I spend one night at the airport and one night on the plane home.
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I wasn’t having a go. I was away from my laptop so just wanted to make some quick points that occurred to me.
I would never use the word boring to describe a cruise. There has never been enough time to do all the things we want to do and still get some sleep. And that is without gambling and drinking.
When we were first married and then when the kids were little we’d do one year with a trip to Florida (with WDW being a part of it and enjoying other FL features as well), and the next year we’d have a baby and a small trip. 
By 12 years in we were so bored of WDW. Way too many other things to do AND the daily price tag is ridiculous. I can’t even properly chronicle all the things we’ve done and places we’ve visited and not one has come to the same cost per day as WDW.
So - being fair - I’ve been over WDW for a long time. But once they went to FPP the ROI was forever diminished and it’s made it easier to space out the trips to longer than every other year. My vacation budget maxes at $100 pp/day.
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Ya’ll are crazy. The beach is awesome.
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A WDW vacation is expensive no doubt, but I think there is a lot of entertainment value for what it costs. The park admission provides you uninterrupted access to rides and shows from 8am to 12am daily across four different theme parks.
Compare to say skiing, which my family does every year in Colorado for Spring Break, WDW is a much better value. Ski lifts are only open from 8:30am till 4pm and the lift tickets are comparable in price to WDW park tickets. Fast food on the mountain is more expensive that QS at WDW.
About ten years ago, my DW and I did a adults’ trip to southern Italy. We stayed at a really nice hotel outside of Positano, Italy right on the water- the San Pietro. I remember distinctly the daily price of the room - 500 euros which for us at the time was ridiculous. The exchange rate for USD made the room $700+ per night and we could only afford to stay three nights. As part of the stay, the hotel had a yacht where you could take a complementary daily two-hour cruise with drinks and appetizers. I met an Englishman on the cruise and commented how expensive the hotel was for my wife and myself. He asked a very simple question - Do you feel like the price is not worth the experience? I had to admit that, to us, the hotel was worth every penny. That’s how I still feel about a WDW vacation. I still feel like the total experience is worth the money.
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If you were there longer, you can spend three or four days each park and accomplish all the same things that you would try to accomplish squeezing in those after hours events. And you would have a much lower cost per day.
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That part it get.
If you were going so frequently, however, do you really need all the add-ons that make it so pricey?
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I like having 2 days per park, plus some offsite days, plus some free days where we can wing it, or perhaps have back-up FPs without having any particular plans.
But then we don’t rope drop. And I like to do things at the resorts (like AKL or wine tasting), go look at other resorts, ride the boats or go do a morning of just SOTMK …
The beach will get a whole lot easier when your kids are just a few years older. I have kids 12, 10, and 7 and we just had a great time there. So much better than when they were your kids’ ages (my 7 yr old being the youngest I can just watch her and trust the older ones to be relatively safe). But I am also the mom that puts coast guard approved vests on everyone just to go into the ocean so I guess “nervous wreck” sort of still applies to me too…that being said, I really did enjoy Ocean City. I love WDW too but all we had to do for the beach was book a hotel and show up. I had zero reservations for anything else and we had a great week.
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Is WDW too expensive? YES
Do I still want to go? YAAASSSS
We stay in value resorts bc I will not pay for anything that costs more. We will eat and drink whatever we want, but we only have 3 TS meals for our 7 night stay. I also won’t pay for the extras, even though I’d love to. It’s just not worth the cost. By the time we go in October, it will be a few months shy of 3 years since the last time I was there. We rarely take actual vacations though, due to career scheduling issues, so I justify the cost that way I suppose.
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